Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism

Interactive Scenarios With Shiny – The Race to the F1 2012 Drivers’ Championship

In Paths to the F1 2012 Championship Based on How They Might Finish in the US Grand Prix I posted a quick hack to calculate the finishing positions that would determine the F1 2012 Drivers’ Championship in today’s United States Grand Prix, leaving a tease dangling around the possibility of working out what combinations would lead to a VET or ALO victory if the championship isn’t decided today. So in the hour before the race started, I began to doodle a quick’n’dirty interactive app that would let me keep track of what the championship scenarios would be for the Brazil race given the lap by lap placement of VET and ALO during the US Grand Prix. Given the prep I’d done in the aforementioned post, this meant figuring out how to code up a similar algorithm in R, and then working out how to make it interactive…

But before I show you how I did it, here’s the scenario for Brazil given how the US race finished:

So how was this quick hack app done…?

Trying out the new Shiny interactive stats app builder from the RStudio folk has been on my to do list for some time. It didn’t take long to realise that an interactive race scenario builder would provide an ideal context for trying it out. There are essentially two (with a minor middle third) steps to a Shiny model:

work out the points difference between VET and ALO for all their possible points combinations in the US Grand Prix;

calculate the points difference going into the Brazilian Grand Prix;

calculate the possible outcomes depending on placements in the Brazilian Grand Prix (essentially, an application of the algorithm I did in the original post).

The Shiny app requires two bits of code – a UI in file ui.R, in which I define two sliders that allow me to set the actual (or anticpated, or possible;-) race classifications in the US for Vettel and Alonso:

And some logic, in file server.R (original had errors; hopefully now bugfixed…) – the original “Paths to the Championship” unpicks elements of the algorithm in a little more detail, but basically I figure out the points difference between VET and ALO based on the points difference at the start of the race and the additional points difference arising from the posited finishing positions for the US race, and then generate a matrix that works out the difference in points awarded for each possible combination of finishes in Brazil: